What I'm Missing

This week has been a bit of a mixed bag – some triumph, some abject failure, some lessons learnt and, most shockingly, some terrible loneliness. Last weekend I visited Manchester for the first time since leaving, and being back in the familiar and comforting surroundings of my own home, with Tony and Philip (our cat) affected me in a way I never expected it to. Unfortunately, the house in London is not a welcoming environment. My housemates are helpful, friendly, talkative and welcoming, which is great and I love them for it, but we live with our landlady’s husband who is not playing with a full deck. Let’s call him Scario. I get the impression that he thinks of the house as the set of Independence Day, and has cast himself in the role of Will Smith, defending his territory against the hostile, betentacled aliens invading his White House. It seems not to matter that said aliens are untentacled, well-behaved, rent-paying tenants, or that the house does not actually belong to him but rather his wife who lives several miles away, he will not be deterred from his war and will continue hiding the cutlery in his bid to defeat us. Unfortunately, he’s winning, and we find ourselves confined to our rooms dreading the voice from the landing calling “can I have a word with you?” and emerging only to find an angry man with a trivial complaint. My favourite recent Scario incident involved getting up in the morning to find him passed out on the sofa in the living room with his trousers undone. All in all, not a personable individual. Anyway, needless to say that leaving my little Manchester haven and returning to the realm of Scario filled me with a feeling akin to the realisation that you’re about to be eaten by a spidercrab. Isn’t it funny how you don’t realise how awful something is until you see the greener grass elsewhere and realise what a resoundingly crap situation you’re actually in? It didn’t help that the Northern Line wasn’t running between Euston and my desired stop, that instead I had to get two busses home, that the first bus I got on was going the wrong way or that the second was diverted.

So, I began this week with an empty feeling – I missed my boyfriend terribly, I missed my home and my cat, and I missed my friends – I currently know 4 people in London. I decided the way to combat this feeling was exercise, and throwing myself into weight loss. Unfortunately though, payday on Wednesday got in the way of my swimming plans and I went shopping instead. Battling through the hordes on Oxford Street though is no mean feat, so at least it wasn’t a total loss. I did, however, swim on Thursday, and what an adventure it was.

East Finchley Leisure Centre doesn’t get the best press. Reviews I read about it before attending told me it was dirty, old and that the floor was wet. Considering that the changing cubicles are pool-side I would be concerned if the floor wasn’t wet, so clearly I don’t expect the same level of luxury from my public pool as those who write these reviews do. To be honest, it was exactly what I was expecting – a little rough around the edges, but nevertheless a big diminishing hole filled with chlorinated water. Excepting the presence of twenty ten-year-old girls in one section creating a noise akin to having your ears pecked to shreds by a flock of marauding seagulls, it was quite pleasant. They have three lanes: slow, medium and fast. In a pool the size of East Finchley it isn’t really necessary to have more and I found myself quite well-matched in the fast lane with the only other person in there. I would state now that I am not a fast champion swimmer, but when your competition can barely manage two lengths together, I look pretty hot. Anyway, I started my swim thinking I’d do a mile of crawl, but 4 lengths in and I was doubting whether I’d get to 10. The first 20 lengths are always the hardest for me and considering that I haven’t swum properly for a good couple of months it was no surprise that my arms hurt. However, despite my lack of stamina and incredible lack of speed I forced myself up to a mile, and I felt wonderful for having managed it.

I should probably explain that I’ve been a very keen swimmer ever since I was allowed near water. I attended stamina training as a child and also used to swim with a triathlon club. Although it might seem strange to hear an unfit, overweight person talk about swimming a mile, I can only do this as a result of ingrained muscle memory. This phenomenon allows a person to retain a certain level of (slow, painful) ability even if they have not participated in the activity for a while. This is how ex-runners can quickly regain their stride, and once steel-legged cyclists rediscover the wind in their hair. It also gives me a little feeling of pleasure when I walk red-faced and wobbly to the poolside amongst furtive looks and giggles, unceremoniously fall in whilst trying to be graceful and then take my position in a higher lane amongst yet more giggles of disbelief, and then out-swim the bastards! HAHA! What? When the zombie apocalypse comes and I have to run for my life, I will certainly die with my inhaler in one hand, cursing my love of the water over that of the road, so I have to take my triumphs where I can.

Upon returning home I was filled with the aforementioned sense of achievement and thoroughly happy with my week so far. As I awoke at 2.30am with terrible stomach ache and proceeded to throw my guts up though I felt less elated. Did I push myself too hard and cause my body to rebel? Was I wrong about East Finchley Leisure Centre and the huge mouthful of water I swallowed around length 47 actually contained e-coli and other sick-making creatures? Or were there darker forces at work? I’ll never know. Although I didn’t sleep again until 5am I STILL got up and went to work, I got through the day and even managed a trip to the pub in the evening to undo all my hard work in the pool.

The weekend included a different kind of activity - volunteering for Time to Change http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/ (look ‘em up, they’re awesome), doing my bit to combat the stigma attached to mental health. As an example myself I feel this is a cause I strongly need to put my weight behind – all of it. They built a make-shift ‘village’ on the South Bank and invited people to come on in, have a look around, watch the adverts, read the bumph, talk to the volunteers who all had a history of mental health issues and generally go away with a more balanced sense of mental health issues and, hopefully, without wanting to use the word ‘psycho’ anymore towards anyone. It was difficult to engage people into hearing about the changes that needed to be made, but we still had a pretty good turn out! My favourite part though was the Human Library where you ‘took out’ a ‘book’ or person, who then told you all about a certain condition or subject related to mental health discrimination. Clever.

Having left the Village of Relative Sanity, as I like to think of it, I met up with Tony for dinner as work had brought him to London for the day. The plan was to have dinner together and therefore not miss out entirely on seeing each other this week. Far from enjoying the 2 or 3 hours we had together though, I actually found it harder to see him for a couple of hours and then say goodbye than I would had I not seen him at all. It seemed to bring to the surface all the feelings of loneliness that have been building since I left home for the second time last weekend, all the feelings that your brain buries to protect you and that only surface again when you’re faced with them. I’ll be honest, I felt terrible. I wanted to hang on to him at the station and ask him not to leave. This was actually the hardest thing I’ve had to do so far and the very first time in my life I’ve felt like this. Watching Tony head off for his train sent me back to the underground in tears and I cried for much of the evening. It isn’t just missing Tony with whom I’ve spent every day for almost two years, it isn’t just missing Philip or home, or my friends, nor is it the fact that I know no one here in London, it’s all of the above. I’ve made three big moves in the past – the first to University which was exciting, the second away from a terrible ex-boyfriend which was liberating, and the third back to Manchester which was exciting once again. Due to the fact that these have all be hugely successful I failed to foresee the emotional upheaval that would accompany this move. In the past I had been moving towards something better – this time I was leaving my partner, my pet and my fully functioning life to live in a cell in a shared house with a scary man who hides the cutlery.

Clearly it’s not just my weight that needs to be addressed, the way I live my life here does too and that’s going to be just as hard. I already need to monitor myself closely to check for signs of relapse, but it seems this isn’t enough. I must make sure that I’m active, that I eat properly, that I go out and see people at least twice a week and that I keep my mind occupied with positive things, or else there’s no way I’ll survive London on my own. I didn’t realise how much strain I would have to put myself under and I have to say that, if it weren’t for the wonder of medication, I would have left on that train with Tony and gone back home where I belong. But I didn’t. And I also managed to lose 5lbs this week, so I win.

It Starts...

Ok, so I didn’t get off to the best start. This weekend was a bit of a blow-out, but all in a good cause as it was our friend’s Superhero birthday party which was a really great night. The question of what to wear though caused no end of problems. See, the problem with superheroes is that they’re all superskinny and their super powers include being able to fit into skin-tight leather or spandex and still maintain functioning, un-squashed organs. Of course everyone was very kind and kept suggesting sexy red-headed superbabes for me to dress up as, such as Poison Ivy. It was unanimously decided however, that I should be Catwoman due to my love of, er, cats. They meant well, but hadn’t really thought it all the way through as these women, awesome though they undoubtedly are, fall into the aforementioned category of spandex-clad feats of engineering. The best I could hope for was Catwoman who’d really let herself go.

I did toy with the idea of going as Cat Lady – dressing in mismatched clothes, a cardigan buttoned up wrongly and a hat made from a whiskas box, but in the end even my pride proved too much to let me attend a party half-filled with strangers looking like I’d abandoned my post as the resident mentalist of a bus. So I wimped out, put on a black dress, a cat mask and some elbow-length gloves and went as a very unconvincing Catwoman. At least we could still enjoy the fun of making Tony’s outfit though! As a point of interest, he’s Thor, not She-Ra – unfortunately that was the only wig we had.

So anyway, I drank too much, ate cake and generally over-indulged. We also didn’t fully get up on Sunday until about 3pm meaning that we wasted the warmest and most beautiful day of sunshine that we’ve seen this year, altogether not my finest hour. I have to admit that I felt pretty ashamed of myself and started wondering how the hell I was going to actually start losing weight if this was what I did on my first weekend into the crusade. In my hungover state though I started watching a program called “I Used to be Fat” on Viva – yes, I know, not the greatest channel to choose for intellectually-enriching programmes, but it seemed the most that my brain could deal with. I was however, pleasantly surprised by the American life-style programme I had found. It featured one teenager per episode (I watched about 3) who took the summer before going to college to have a complete blitz on their weight. They were given a personal trainer, an enormous countdown calendar and, most pleasingly, a complete make-over of their lives. They were encouraged to think differently about food and exercise, to try several different activities, to learn to cook and eat healthily and their families were also included in this re-education and taught how to support their child and help them succeed. Here was a programme about normal people – not perfect, airbrushed characters in Beverley Hills or some other part of California, teaching teenagers that only beauty and an unnaturally thin body can make you really happy – here was a programme teaching teenagers that there are a lot of people who are fat, that they are fat for many different reasons, that every single one of them is a person you can really like and that being fat isn’t just about being lazy and eating cake – in these cases it was about emotional instability, mental-abuse in one case, family-lifestyle and poor nutritional education. I can honestly say I thoroughly enjoyed watching these kids transform their lives and their attitudes and lose upwards of 70lbs in around 100 days.

Of course, this isn’t really a viable option for me; having a job kind of eliminates the option of working out 6-8 hours a day with a personal trainer. It did, however, make me remember the last time I lost all my weight – I was living at home after university and a very, very bad break-up and attending the Jackie and David bootcamp for fat daughters. Putting my life and my health in the hands of my parents was the best thing I could have done. They regulated meals, bought me a membership to their gym and made me go, they forced me to attend weight-watchers every week – not to follow their meal plan, which I really don’t agree with, but to be weighed. Even though their methods were hard work and they very often made me feel pretty worthless for being fat, they brought me back out of myself and helped me rebuild my confidence. This time though I have to do it alone, I have to motivate myself, not let dips in my depression-cycle overcome me and keep on pressing towards my goal, and that’s frightening. Especially since I left my boyfriend, my cat, my home and my friends two and half weeks ago and moved my entire life down to London to live in a room in a shared house and start a new job. This is the time to be making changes, it's a fresh new start and a logical time for a physical spring-clean (it being spring) and to learn how to do it alone, without my support network. It's also the worst time to do it - without my support network.

So, when I get paid on Wednesday I will buy a swim membership and go at least twice a week (hopefully three times), I will walk home from the tube station at night instead of getting the bus and I will climb the two flights of stairs to work twice a day. These are my starting steps, they are not big, but they are manageable. I’ll let you know how it goes...